I paused. He thought a moment. Then he said: "I can't talk any longer, now. Make another appointment with Lamont. I want to hear what you have to say." And he dismissed me.
Colonel Lamont told me to come back on the following afternoon; and I went away with the dubious relief of feeling that if I had not yet won my case I had, at least, succeeded in having judgment reserved. I went to work to arrange my arguments for the morrow, to make them as concise as possible and to divide them into brief chapters in case I should have as little opportunity for extended explanations as the President had been giving me. I saw that the whole matter was gloomy and oppressive to him—that his responsibility was as dark on his mind as our sufferings—and I took the hint of his amused interest, in order to work out ways of brightening the subject with anecdote and illustration.
I saw Colonel Lamont on the morrow, and he beamed a congratulation on me. "You've aroused his curiosity," he said. "You've interested him."
He had made an appointment some days ahead; and when I entered the President's office to keep that appointment, I found Mr. Cleveland at his desk, as if he had not moved in the interval, laboriously reading and signing papers as before. It gave me an impression of immovability, of patient and methodical relentlessness that was disheartening.
But as soon as he turned to me, I found him another man. He was interested, receptive, almost genial. He gave me an opportunity to cover the whole ground of my case, and I went over it step by step. He showed no emotion when I recited some of the incidents of pathetic suffering among our people; and at first he seemed doubtful whether he should be amused by the humorous episodes that I narrated. But I did not wish merely to amuse him; I was trying to convey to his mind (without saying so) that so long as a people could suffer and laugh too, they could never be overcome by the mere reduplication of their sufferings. He looked squarely at me, with a most determined front, when I told him that the Mormons would be ground to powder before they would yield. "They can't yield," I warned him. "They're like the passengers on a train going with a mad speed down a dangerous grade. For any of them to attempt to jump is simple destruction. They can only pray to Providence to help them. But if that train were to be brought to a stop at some station where they could alight with anything like self-respect, there would be many of them glad to get off—even though the train had not arrived at its 'revealed' destination."
I do not remember—and if I did, it would be tedious to relate—the exact sequence and progression of argument in this interview and the dozen others that succeeded it. Mr. Cleveland became more and more interested in the Mormon people, their family life, their religion, and their politics. He was as painstaking in acquiring information about them as he was in performing all the other duties of his office. I might have been discouraged by the number and apparent ineffectiveness of my interviews with him, had not Colonel Lamont kept me informed of the growth of the President's good feeling and of his genuinely paternal interest in the people of Utah. It became more than a personal desire with Mr. Cleveland to benefit politically by a settlement of the Mormon troubles, if indeed he had ever had such a desire. His humanity was enlisted, his conscience appealed to.
He asked me, once, if I knew anything of Mr. Sandford, and I replied that I knew him and believed in him. He told me, at last, that he was going to appoint Mr. Sandford Chief Justice of Utah, and added significantly, "I suppose he will get in touch with the situation." I accepted this remark as a permission to confer with Mr. Sandford, and I journeyed to New York to see him and to renew the understanding I had with him.
He was appointed Chief justice on the 9th day of July, 1888, and—as the Mormon people expressed it—"the backbone of the raid was broken." On August 26, 1888, he arrived in Salt Lake City. On September 17, my father came before him in court and pleaded guilty to two indictments charging him with "unlawful cohabitation." He was fined $450 and sentenced to the penitentiary for one hundred and seventy-five days. His example was followed by a number of prominent Mormons, including Francis Marion Lyman, who is today the President of the Quorum of the twelve Apostles and next in rank for the Presidency. It is true that not many cases, relatively speaking, came to Justice Sandford; but the leader whom the authorities were most eager to subjugate under Federal power was judged and sentenced; and the effect, both on the country and on the Mormon people, was all that we had expected.
There are memories in a man's life that have a peculiar value. One such, to me, is the picture I have in mind of my father undergoing his penitentiary sentence, wearing his prison clothes with an unconsciousness that makes me still feel a pride in the power of the human soul to rise superior to the deformities of circumstance. Charles Wilcken (whom I have described driving us to Bountiful) was visiting him one day in the prison office, when a guard entered with his hat on. Wilcken snatched it from his head. "Never enter his presence," he said, "without taking it off." And the guard never did again.... I salute the memory. I come to it with my head bare and my back stiffened. I see in that calm face the possibilities of the human spirit. He was a man!
He spent his time, there, as he would have spent it elsewhere, writing, conferring with the agents of his authority, planning for his people. I saw he was aware that he would emerge from his imprisonment a free man, personally, but still enslaved by the conditions of the community; and I knew that he would use his freedom to free the others. I knew that he had accepted his sentence with this end in view. In plain words, I knew now—though he never said so—that he was looking toward the necessary recession from the doctrine of polygamy, and that he may have counted on the spectacle of his imprisonment to help prepare his people for a general submission to the law.